It is no longer the young and the restless in India

I am struck by the profound demographic shift in India—very few children, who seem to be outnumbered by senior citizens.

In the India that I grew up, I recall hearing about only person, among all the extended family and friends, who was more than ninety years old. She was 99 when she died, and I was sad she did not live a couple of more months to reach that magical 100.

I was, otherwise, more used to stories of men and women dying in their fifties. When my grandmother died at 67 years of age, well, that was considered then a long and rich life. Now, my father’s uncle is going strong at 94, with quite a few others in their nineties and late eighties. Against such a background, my mother feels too young to complain about aching back; after all, she is only 70!

Meanwhile, in the India of yesteryears, I was almost always tripping over infants and toddlers. What a contrast now— there are very few children around even in the bustling railway stations, where children crying and their mothers yelling at them used to be a constant background noise.

What happened?

Everything in India, including its population structure, is transforming rapidly. The life span, particularly in urban India, has remarkably lengthened thanks to better nourishment and healthcare. At the same time, parents are having fewer children, especially in the southern states in India. So much so that well into the extended family only one cousin has more than two children—he has three. Most of the rest have only one child, and a few are yet to have any, even after a few years of being married. In some cases, even the only child is an adopted one.

Smaller family sizes are not merely anecdotal; the total fertility rate—the average number of children per woman in her childbearing years—in the peninsular India is less than the roughly 2.1 per woman needed to replace the population. In Tamil Nadu, which is where my parents live, the fertility rate is about 1.8. The other southern states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh also have similar low fertility rates.

I suspect that the fertility rate in the metropolitan areas of these states is considerably lower than 1.8. Such low fertility rates translates to fewer babies, which is why I feel like I have experienced a lot more crying babies in the airports in America, where the fertility rate is 2.1.

The fascinating aspect to this story of decrease in fertility rates is that it has happened without strict government mandates. While public health messages do advocate for smaller family sizes, there is no strict government-imposed one-child policy, a la China.

Such an effect is what development economists have argued for a long time—that economic development is the best contraceptive! As people climb the economic ladders into middle class conditions, they voluntarily decide to have fewer children.

It is also interesting to note that the states with the highest fertility rates, like Bihar, are also the ones that are economic laggards, which then adds more evidence to the idea that economic growth plays an important role in an overall decrease in population growth rates.

Not wanting to wait for economic growth to happen, one federal minister in India recently suggested providing free television to the poor because apparently procreation will otherwise be their only free recreation. I wonder, though, about what will ensue if the television audience watches advertisements for Viagra and the like!

Thus, with low birthrates and simultaneous increases in life spans, it is not any surprise that increasingly people are as concerned, if not more, about taking care of the old as much as they worry about their children’s futures. My parents’ 72-year old neighbor rang the doorbell at 5:15 in the morning to inform us that her mother died, and that she was heading out of town for the funeral and related rites. The deceased was 94, and she leaves behind many in the immediate family including her 100-year old husband to whom she was married for almost 80 years.

Here is to wishing India a lot more of such fantastic demographic and economic transformations.